Crime, Law Enforcement, and Penology: Year In Review 1993

Violent Crime

Terrorism. In the early months of 1993, three of the world’s major cities and financial centres, New York, Bombay, and London, were each the target of devastating bombing attacks. On February 26 a 550-kg (1,210-lb) bomb, packed in a van, exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, ripping a 60-m (200-ft) crater in the basement of the world’s second tallest building. The blast, which killed 6 people and injured more than 1,000, caused millions of dollars of damage and severely disrupted business. Officials described it as "the most destructive terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil."

On March 12 a string of bomb explosions struck the business district of Bombay, including the 29-story building housing the Bombay Stock Exchange and another skyscraper occupied by Air-India. The attacks killed 317 people, injured more than 1,100, and caused damage exceeding $250 million in India’s commercial capital. (SeeWORLD AFFAIRS [South and Central Asia]: India.)

On April 24 a massive bomb exploded in a truck parked in the City (financial district) of London. One person was killed by the blast and some 44 injured, while property damage amounting to almost $1 billion was inflicted on more than 100 surrounding buildings, including a 13th-century church. A little over a year earlier, also in the City, a similar bomb had produced widespread devastation. (SeeWORLD AFFAIRS [Europe]: United Kingdom.)

The three incidents provided a frightening demonstration of the destructive capacity of modern terrorists and of the vulnerability of large cities to such attacks. In the United States, which had in the past remained largely immune from international terrorist attacks, particular concern was expressed that those groups were shifting their attention to targets within the country. That concern was heightened as investigators into the World Trade Center bombing began rapidly to uncover a complex conspiracy among a group of Islamic fundamentalists to commit this and other acts of urban terrorism in the U.S. The mastermind of this conspiracy was alleged to be Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the spiritual leader of the fundamentalists in Egypt and elsewhere in the world.

In Northern Ireland on October 23, Irish Republican Army assassins armed with a bomb walked into a busy Belfast fish shop. The bomb exploded, probably prematurely, killing 10 people, including one of the bombers, and injuring more than 50 people. The bombing provoked an immediate wave of revenge killings by the Ulster Freedom Fighters, an outlawed Protestant extremist group. Political leaders from both sides of Northern Ireland’s deeply divided sectarian society condemned the killings, which seemed intended to derail recent peace talks aimed at ending this long-standing conflict.

In June the trial began in Kuwait of 14 persons accused of a plot to assassinate former U.S. president George Bush during his visit to that country in April. Wali ’Abd al-Hadi al-Ghazali, one of two defendants to plead guilty at the opening session of the trial, claimed that he was approached by Iraqi intelligence officers to kill Bush with a car bomb or, if this failed, by detonating a pack of explosives tied to his body. The mission failed completely because the police uncovered the plot and arrested the conspirators. On June 27, U.S. naval forces in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf launched 23 Tomahawk missiles aimed at the Iraqi intelligence service headquarters in Baghdad, where the Bush assassination plot was said to have been planned. Twenty missiles were believed to have found their target, but the strike also killed at least 8 Iraqi civilians and injured 20.

War Crimes. The continuing atrocities being perpetrated by the combatants involved in the civil war in the Balkans prompted the UN Security Council to vote in February to establish an international tribunal to try war crimes in the republics of the former Yugoslav federation. The tribunal was the first of its kind to be set up since the victorious Allies in World War II established similar bodies in Nürnberg, Germany, and Tokyo to try Nazi and Japanese leaders. In September the UN General Assembly elected candidates from 11 nations to serve as members of the new tribunal, which would try those accused of murder, rape, torture, "ethnic cleansing," and other crimes committed since the breakup of Yugoslavia. Critics suggested that the tribunal would experience great practical difficulties obtaining objective evidence of war crimes and of linking such crimes to the leaders of the various factions involved in the Yugoslav conflict.

On July 29 the Israeli Supreme Court quashed the conviction and death sentence imposed on John Demjanjuk, the former Cleveland, Ohio, autoworker who was believed to have been the Nazi death camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible." The court said that it had found "reasonable doubt" that Demjanjuk was the sadistic killer who operated the gas ovens at the Treblinka concentration camp. The court’s decision was based on new evidence from archives in the former Soviet Union. (SeeLAW.)

Drug Trafficking. At a major conference on U.S. drug policy held in Washington, D.C., in May, newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and other high-ranking officials raised serious questions about the nation’s entire drug-interdiction apparatus, suggesting that it could well be futile to continue trying to win the war against drugs by stopping drugs from entering the country. Influential members of the U.S. Congress expressed similar concerns. According to the chairperson of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice, Rep. Charles E. Schumer (Dem., N.Y.), "The international eradication and interdiction effort has been a near total failure."

In Colombia the nation’s continuing battle to combat drug traffickers, assisted by the U.S., seemed to be making little progress. A series of bombings and assassinations in Medellín, the world’s cocaine centre, and Bogotá, the nation’s capital, caused a wave of death and destruction. Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellín drug cartel and at large since a July 1992 jailbreak, was killed in a December shootout with soldiers and police. (SeeWORLD AFFAIRS [Latin America and the Caribbean]: Colombia.)

Murder and Other Violence. Violent crime in the U.S. increased slightly in 1992, but the overall level of crime reported to law-enforcement agencies declined 3% compared with 1991. Commenting on the crime figures, the newly appointed FBI director, Louis J. Freeh, said that "any reduction in reported crime is welcome but the amount of violent crime and other grave offenses nationwide remains intolerable."

The rate of violent crime, which included murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, rose by 1% during the year. There were 23,760 murders in 1992, a 4% drop from the record-setting level of 1991. Firearms were used in approximately 7 out of every 10 murders and in one in 3 of all murders, robberies, and aggravated assaults collectively. Almost half of the murder victims were related to or acquainted with their assailants. Among female murder victims almost one-third were killed by their husbands or boyfriends.

The deadly impact of the gun culture in the United States was dramatically illustrated by a National Center for Health Statistics report that gunshots now caused one in every four deaths among U.S. teenagers. Bullets killed 4,200 teenagers in 1990, the most recent year for which figures were available, compared with 2,500 in 1985. According to the National Education Association, an estimated 100,000 students carried a gun to school, while a Louis Harris poll released in July revealed that among a sample of 11- to 18-year-old students surveyed in 96 schools across the country, 15% said they had carried a handgun in the previous 30 days.

On July 1 a lone gunman walked into a San Francisco law office and opened fire with a 9-mm Uzi machine gun and a .45-calibre semiautomatic pistol. The gunman, later identified as Gian Ferri, a mortgage broker, killed eight people and injured six before fatally shooting himself. The attack, which took place on the 34th and 32nd floors of a 49-story office building in the heart of the city’s financial district, was a graphic example of the violent crime that was affecting the daily lives of Americans across the nation. In Florida particular concern was expressed at the effect this violence was having on the state’s highly lucrative tourist industry. Nationwide statistics on attacks on tourists were not available, but in 1992 in Florida alone 36,766 visitors, foreign and domestic, were murdered, raped, robbed, or otherwise victimized. From October 1992 to October 1993, nine foreign tourists were murdered in the state, and these deaths received extensive publicity in the U.S. and abroad. In Japan travel agents reported that bad publicity of this type was persuading Japanese tourists to vacation in safer destinations.

In England in November, the trial was held of two 11-year-old boys on charges of abduction and murder of a 2-year-old boy, James Bulger, who strayed from his mother at a crowded shopping mall in Liverpool. The abduction was filmed by an automatic security camera in the mall, and the pictures were subsequently widely broadcast on British television. The crime deeply shocked and repelled the local community. The accused boys, who were both 10 at the time of the crimes, were the youngest ever to have been charged with murder in Britain. Because angry crowds attacked the police van carrying the boys to their first court appearance in February, officials moved their trial to Preston, a town 50 km (30 mi) north of Liverpool. Both boys pleaded not guilty to all charges. In late November, however, a jury of three women and nine men found them guilty. They were sentenced to detention "at Her Majesty’s pleasure," the equivalent of a life sentence in a high-security unit. Only four other youths were serving life sentences in Britain.

In Brazil and other Latin-American countries, homeless children living on the streets were reported to be the continuing victims of violence. According to UNICEF estimates, 1,000 minors were murdered each year in Brazil, while in Colombia, with one-quarter of the population, twice as many were said to be being killed. Street children were claimed to be the particular targets of police shootings in such cities as Rio de Janeiro because they represented a threat to businessmen who lost trade when customers stayed away from their stores for fear of being mugged or pickpocketed. Few of those responsible for these murders were apprehended, and fewer still successfully prosecuted.

Two women and three children died on May 29 in the German steelmaking city of Solingen when the two-story home of a Turkish family was firebombed. The attack, allegedly plotted by a group of four local skinheads known for their neo-Nazi sympathies, set off a wave of angry demonstrations across the country by Turkish residents, who formed Germany’s largest group of foreign guest workers. These workers, 1.8 million of them Turks, were increasingly the object of insults and attacks in many parts of the nation. (SeeWORLD AFFAIRS [Europe]: Germany.)

Crime, Law Enforcement, and Penology: Year In Review 1993. (2015). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1573177/Crime-Law-Enforcement-and-Penology-Year-In-Review-1993

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